Attacker at Brooklyn Synagogue Had History of Mental Illness

Ms. Peters sensed this might indicate a problem with the drugs her husband was prescribed for bipolar disorder, she later told her brother-in-law, Jeffrey A. St. Clair. Perhaps Mr. Peters had gone off his medication again.

He grew worse on Saturday, Mr. St. Clair said. Ms. Peters called a mental health provider near the family’s home in Valley Stream, on Long Island, to report her concerns.

A psychiatrist scheduled a visit for Sunday at the family’s home, but by the time of the appointment, Mr. Peters had vanished.

Relatives fanned out across Brooklyn. The family had lived there until about seven years ago, and still returned often.

“How do you find a needle in a haystack?” said Mr. St. Clair, who is a lawyer and is married to Mr. Peters’s sister, Cathleen St. Clair.

By early Tuesday morning, it was too late. The police knocked on the St. Clairs’ door in Baldwin, N.Y., at 4 a.m. with terrible news. A few hours earlier, Mr. Peters had entered a Crown Heights synagogue and jabbed a knife into the neck and head of an Israeli rabbinical student before being shot to death by the police.

Parts of the police confrontation with Mr. Peters were recorded on cellphone video, and the first officer to respond had persuaded Mr. Peters to drop his knife. But seconds later, Mr. Peters grabbed it back and was shot by another officer. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton said the officers involved appeared to have acted with poise and restraint.

The student who was stabbed, Levi Rosenblat, 22, was alert and recovering on Wednesday, said Rabbi Motti Seligson, a spokesman for Chabad-Lubavitch, the Jewish movement in whose headquarters the synagogue attack took place.

Dov Hikind, a state assemblyman from Brooklyn, said that doctors on Tuesday discovered a “blood clot, something they didn’t realize initially,” in Mr. Rosenblat’s brain. Assemblyman Hikind said Mr. Rosenblat’s mother arrived in New York from Israel on Wednesday afternoon to be with her son.

Despite the setting of the attack, in a center of Brooklyn’s Jewish community, the police said the violence did not appear to be motivated by bias.

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Calvin Peters’s home in Valley Stream, on Long Island. After growing concerns about Mr. Peters, his wife scheduled a psychiatrist to visit, but by the time of the appointment, he had vanished.CreditUli Seit for The New York Times

“I’ve known him 20 years, and I never heard him say anything anti-Semitic in his entire life,” Mr. St. Clair said.

The family said Mr. Peters first showed signs of bipolar disorder 20 years ago, after his mother died after a painful battle with multiple myeloma. He was born in Trinidad to a large, athletic family and distinguished himself as a standout soccer player.

After he emigrated to the United States with his family, he began his rough relationship with bipolar medication. At first, it made him lethargic and dazed.

“He just was weird, nothing dangerous, not threatening, kind of more to himself,” Mr. St. Clair said. “They kind of look through you.”

Mr. Peters stopped taking the medication, and his symptoms returned, Mr. St. Clair said. Around that time, in January 2006, Mr. Peters was arrested and charged in Brooklyn with attacking a person with a screwdriver, driving the tool into the victim’s hand, according to a criminal complaint.

In the following weeks, Mr. Peters was arrested in Brooklyn and charged with the possession of crack cocaine, and two weeks later in Midtown for trying to slip out of a Macy’s with $500 in merchandise hidden under his clothes. (In 2001 and in 2002, the police had encounters with Mr. Peters not as a criminal suspect, but as an “emotionally disturbed person.”) Mr. St. Clair said that the family staged an intervention following the 2006 arrests, and that Mr. Peters went back on his medication. Soon, he seemed healthy to everyone around him.

“You wouldn’t have known” that he had bipolar disorder or took medication to manage it, Mr. St. Clair said.

Mr. Peters’s eldest son began to play soccer, bringing the spark back to his eye. Unable to hold a job because of his mental health condition, Mr. Peters devoted his life to his sons’ sports, driving them to and from practices and games. His eldest son, in particular, was a standout, passing up his high school team so he could play for a touring soccer team.

“That brought him back to life,” Mr. St. Clair said. “All he talked about was his son’s soccer. When he spoke about his son, his face would be beaming. He was Mr. Mom.”

Mr. St. Clair last saw Mr. Peters over the summer. The families visited for backyard barbecues, and the St. Clairs babysat the Peters’ rescue dog.

“He was fine,” Mr. St. Clair said. “He seemed totally cool.”

On Tuesday morning, after the police left, Mr. St. Clair spoke with Ms. Peters, and she told him about the past few days.

“Nobody saw this coming,” he said. “He seemed to have it under control. You can’t really tell with these things. It’s the human brain.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: History of Mental Illness for Attacker at Synagogue. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe